Posts Tagged ‘Pablo Picasso’

In one of our former posts, we reflected on Sylvano Bussotti’s scores and on his habit, of tracing them as he would do in front of a canvas: so that in many cases the border between the musical and the pictorial page is blurred or even removed. Reading his music often means browsing the page in various directions, following the paths, traced by dotted lines, arrows and pointers of other sorts; and seldom we can sink into the relaxing safety of left-to-right, top-down reading.

This possibility, of writing music in a spatially different way, was widely taken advantage of during the twentieth century, although without reaching Bussotti’s radicalism. But how far in time should we go back, in search of a pathfinder who first dreamed of “painting”, instead of writing music? A good reference point is Arthur Vincent Lourié (1892-1966), a Russian composer who, a few years after the Revolution, settled in France and then in New York. In his young years he was in close relationship with the poets Vladimir Majakovskij, Anna Achmatova and Aleksandr Blok; and then he was among the subscribers of the Futurist Manifesto in Russia, forestalling Marinetti who went there for promoting the Italian novelty, and found a group of Russian artists and scholars forcefully determined to claim their novelty…Read more

You can listen to Arthur Lourié’s Formes en l’air (à Pablo Picasso), performed by Alfonso Alberti inside the concert:

On April 20th, 1893 in Barcelona was born the father of the Surrealism, Joan Miró i Ferrà, the world renowned Spanish Catalan painter, sculptur and ceramist.
Son of a watchmaking father and a goldsmith mother, he begane to draw when he was only 8 years old.
Miró attended the School of industrial and Fine Arts in Barcelona until 1910, during hia attendance he took private lessons of painting. After suffering a nervous breakdown he dicided to abandone the business world for art.
In 1920 he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and developed his trend of surrealist painting.
From 1929 to 1930 Miró begane to make interest in the objects as such, in the form of collages.
During his final period he concentrated on monumental and public works. One of Miró’s most important works in the United States is his only glass mosaic mural, Personnage Orseaux created for Wichita State University’s Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Kansas. The mural is one of Miró’s largest two-dimensional projects, undertaken when he was 79 and completed when he was 85 years of age.Fabrication of the mural was actually completed in 1977, but Miró did not consider it finished until the installation was complete.
He died bedridden at his home in Palma (Majorca) on December 25, 1983.
Many of his pieces are exhibited today in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and Fundació Joan Miró in Montjuïc, Barcelona.

Listen to songs from the album Tangos at an Exhibition!, including "Promenade I", "Autant en emporte le tango", "Promenade II", and many more. Buy the album for $7.99. Songs start at $0.99. Free with ...